Was Nehru descended from Maharastrian Brahmins? A few months ago a retired professor who used to teach in the Shia College in Lucknow passed away, but before Pandit B N Sharga died, he stirred up a controversy by making a statement and giving an interview to a newspaper that Jawahar Lal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were Maharastrian Brahmins.

He also claimed that
these families had settled down in Kashmir following a major slaughter of
Kashmiri Pandits during the time of Aurangzeb that took place much before the publicized
exodus of January 1990.

In an interview with a
local fortnightly newspaper Lucknow Talk, Sharga who was supposed to be
some sort of expert on Kashmiri Pandits and has left behind several books claimed
that Nehru and the Nehru family did not belong to Kashmir, but belonged to
Maharashtra.

In
Focus

Nehru
had a very close connection with Lucknow and it was at the Lucknow Railway
station that he had first met Mahatma
Gandhi. The spot has now been turned into a memorial.

Several
Kashmiri Pandit families lived and settled down in Uttar
Pradesh in the towns of Allahabad and Lucknow, which were the happy
hunting grounds of the Nehru family till the 1970s. Rajiv
Gandhi as child lived in
Lucknow and Indira
Gandhi had a house near
Hazratganj in the La Place colony where former Congress MP from Unnao, Annu
Tandon lived a few years ago near the Park Inn Hotel.

Among
those close to Nehru were the Chakbast family of the famous poet who now live
near China Bazaar and the Bakshi family where the ninety three-year-old
matriarch Swarup Kumari Bakshi still holds sway.

Dr
Sharga also had a very revealing statement to make. In his book 'Sharga
Puran' which traces the ancestry of Kashmiri Pandits, Dr Sharga claimed to
have written this in great detail.

Several
mosques were built in Kashmir during the reign of Aurangzeb. It is at this time
that he unleashed a reign of terror on his subjects who were not Muslims. During the reign of
Aurangzeb it was seen that several thousands of Kashmiri Hindus were
converted to Islam at the point of a sword.

In the end only 11
Brahmin families remained in the valley who took refuge in the forests to
escape the wrath of the Mughal ruler. At this stage to increase their
numbers the Kashmiris appealed to Marathi Brahmins for help and intermarried
with several girls from the region of Maharashtra. At the same time several
Marathi families were settled in Kashmir to increase the numbers of the
Brahmins there claimed Sharga .

Sharga
says that even from Uttarakhand region Brahmin girls were imported to
Kashmir for their fair and good looks to be intermarried with the population
there. It was similar to the crisis Brahmins faced in Bengal when they were
divided into two groups.

The Barendra Brahmins
and the Pravasi or Rad Brahmins, who came from Uttar Pradesh in Kannauj. The
Bannerjis, the Chatterjis and the Mukherjees all came from this region and
became fish eaters and non-vegetarians after settling down in Bengal.

In the case of Kashmir,
the Joshis from Uttarakhand who settled there became part and parcel of Kashmir
and later began to be known as Zutshis. He said that certain surnames can be
traced to Uttarkhand like the Zutshis and the Shungloos who were originally
imported from Uttarakhand.

Their
descendants later adopted surnames like Zutshis, Shungloos and so on. All
Kashmiri Pandits today are therefore Marathi Brahmins too. In fact Marathi
Brahmins were extremely good looking and could account for the fact that some
Kashmiri women are extremely good looking today, Sharga a confirmed bachelor
was known to have said.

Similarly
Dr Sharga claims that even the families like the Kauls, the Nehrus and the
Shargas and many others all are Marathi Brahmins too.

However,
Sharga has opened a new chapter in the debate regarding Kashmiri Pandits and
the several exoduses of Kashmir Pandits that took place from the state.
The rumours of girls being imported into Kashmir so that the Pandit boys could
get married also bears credence since it is not possible for a Kashmiri Pandit
to marry his cousin as it is looked upon as incest by the Hindu religion.

The
question however remains that all the claims that Sharga made have not been
borne out by any DNA testing and since the descendants of the Nehru family are
still around then maybe some genetic research on them could shed light on
whether Kashmiri Pandits are the descendants of Maharashtrian Pandits or not.

However
history seems to favour Sharga's hypothesis. It may be recalled that the Ninth
Guru of the Sikhs defied the might of the Mughal Empire and was martyred to
save the Kashmiri Pandits who appealed to him for help. The Tenth Guru died fighting
for their cause too. However the Kashmiri Pandits have never expressed their
gratitude to the Sikhs.